Wida Septarina

Indonesia ranks second in food waste worldwide. Yet, 16.2 million people in Indonesia still face hunger, 21.6% of Indonesian toddlers are stunted, and almost half of Indonesia's elderly are at risk of malnutrition. To fight the issue, Wida creates a volunteer-based movement consisting of housewives, teachers, local communities and private companies to process and distribute food excess from the family and food industry to the vulnerable community.

Wida is building a sustainable and scalable model to redistribute food excess to low-income women, children, and elderly people in a way that empowers them and is embedded in Indonesia's tradition and culture. Through Yayasan Lumbung Pangan Indonesia (YLPI), Wida wants to fight inequalities and hunger in Indonesia. She has created a model that emphasizes creating a volunteer-based movement through community interconnectedness. Each program focuses on how the community can replicate the program at the grassroots level. For example, Wida creates a Community Food Kitchen, a place for the community to donate, produce, and distribute food to the elderly and low-income families. This becomes a collective effort to build community resilience at the district level. In addition, Wida also uses the community kitchen as a space to educate households about food excess management and responsible consumers, as well as find potential community leaders to lead the movement. Now, YLPI has more than 8,000 volunteers in 47 cities, of which more than 80 % are women who call themselves the 'women against the hunger' movement.

While building the movement at the grassroots level, Wida ensures the supply of excess food with good quality flows to the communities. Wida successfully partnered with big corporations in the food and logistics industry to support the YLPI program. Wida knew that the big food industry had a zero-waste food program that was in line with the model created by YLPI, and it could become a mutually beneficial cooperation between the two. Wida also created a food bank to store excess food and provide quality control checks. Wida also unlocks the CSR funding that hasn’t contributed to the food excess and waste issue up until this point. The logistic corporations allow YLPI to distribute food excess across Indonesia. In addition, Wida brings corporations to the movement alongside communities across Indonesia by creating Wings of Mother, a program to fight stunting cases in rural areas. Wings of Mother helps mothers get access to good and nutritious food for their children by providing food interventions for children aged 0-5 years, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers, as well as providing education and assistance for children, parents and caregivers, cadres and local government leaders to increase the capacity of knowledge and skills.

The government started acknowledging Wida’s work. In 2022, the Indonesian Government officially established the National Food Agency (NFA), and YLPI became its strategic partner. Wida assisted NFA as an expert and co-created a program together. This shows recognition from the Indonesian government, which is crucial in helping YLPI achieve its future goal of having each district in Indonesia have its own food bank as a platform for the movement. The NFA can become a strategic partner within the government ecosystem in advocating for the government to create regulations about food excess and food waste in Indonesia. Wida also designed an app to track and collect data on food excess distribution to make the movement easier and more accountable, and the data can be useful for the government to map the spread of marginalised communities that face the issue.

Indonesia still faces high rates of hunger within the poor community in rural areas. 47.3% of the elderly face malnutrition, and Indonesia ranks 2nd in ASEAN on Global Hunger Index. Yet Indonesia also wastes 1.3 billion tons of food yearly or equal to around 20 billion USD. Out of the short-life food that gets thrown away, 80% is simply because it hasn’t been sold at the end of the day. These circumstances are becoming problematic because the current food waste from excess food can provide food for up to 125 million people (47% of the total population). This shows considerable inequality. The Ministry of National Development Planning has highlighted independent actions initiated by food bank organisations through local community groups like Food Guard, but it will take a multi-stakeholder approach to reduce and manage food-lost waste so that food resilience in Indonesia can become more robust

25% of Indonesian children have endured stunting, 1 out of 5 children in Jakarta are stunted because of lack of nutrition, and 10% suffer malnourishment (Borgen Project). Parenting skills also contributed to causing stunting. Research in 2019 showed that only 20% of parents in Indonesia understand and implement a healthy lifestyle. Many parents ignore the importance of nutritious food; for example, many parents in East Indonesia trade fresh seafood with instant noodles, and many parents are still smoking around their babies. Many said they don’t want to cook and only buy instant food for their children.

On the other hand, until now, the Indonesian government has yet to create a single regulation to control the amount of food waste despite the huge amount. Research from Surplus stated that small food store businesses are reluctant to become responsible producers because there are no consequences. They throw out food when they can’t sell 100% to the customer. The same thing happens within the household. Citizens don’t feel wrong about how much food waste they produce. And, even if they want to donate excess food, most people have no idea how to or are afraid that they can poison others and would be held responsible for the act.

Initially, at her office garage, Wida and her partner started collecting and distributing excess food to low-income families and providing complimentary breakfast for kindergarten students in her neighbourhood. Wida was surprised to see how many people were waiting in long lines to receive the food she was providing. After that, driven by her curiosity, she researched the issue of hunger in Indonesia and found out that this is a complex issue that no one is really taking care of, even the government. She and her partner learned from many references, including the food bank concept worldwide. Then, Wida designed her own model in the Indonesian context. YLPI has developed its own quality control standard to divide the quality of excess food they receive. The quality control standard aims to ensure no food ends up in landfills, as true to their commitment: packaged ready-to-eat foods that meet quality standards (no odour, no discolouration) are given directly to beneficiaries via Mobile Food Bank, a moving kitchen truck. Raw produce and other foods that need to be processed are distributed to Community Kitchen. Foods not passing the QC are sent to farmers as a natural fertiliser. In 2016, the Yayasan Lumbung Pangan Indonesia was legally registered as a foundation in Indonesia.

Furthermore, Wida continues her research to collect data from the community and create a series of campaigns to raise community awareness. Wida went to many districts in Indonesia and met with grassroots communities, pitched the idea of a community kitchen, and invited them to volunteer. YLPI also adapted some of the food bank concept and localized it to the Indonesian context. The Indonesian government has a program called Family Welfare Empowerment (PKK), which is led by women in every district in Indonesia. Wida decided to engage PKK to co-lead the program, and successfully created a network of mothers in the movement who now call themselves "women against the hunger" movement. This community influenced other community members to send excess food from events such as weddings to the kitchen, ensuring that no food is wasted, mapping the vulnerable communities in the neighbourhood, and creating their own programs with corporations. This mechanism enables the community to create collective action (gotong royong), as part of Indonesian culture in building community food resilience.

In addition, Wida integrates the YLPI program into stunting prevention. Through the Wings of Mothers program, Wida is working with Posyandu (Integrated Health System Indonesia). Wings of Mothers not only targets pregnant women and their babies but also activates the PKK community to be part of the program, as well as approaching preschool and elementary schools to engage the parents on the importance of nutrition: parents and teachers are educated on the importance of breakfast for children’s development and there is a series of cooking classes for the parent. In addition, Wida involves nutrition specialists and other experts in designing the program to unleash the potential of the community in the program. In 2019, the Wings of Mothers got a nomination for the top 8 innovative programs from the Global Food Bank Network.

Leveraging her past corporate experience, Wida successfully brings companies to the movement. Wida approaches food producers, such as retail grocery stores, restaurants, and chain bakeries, to change how they handle excess food. Instead of throwing it away or extinguishing it, the local YLPI volunteers would receive food donations and distribute them to the vulnerable community. YLPI also successfully partners with JNE, a large shipping company in Indonesia, to support excess food shipping from food donors to local Volunteers. With the JNE branch office spread over all sub-districts in Indonesia, YLPI already has the power to reach as many communities as possible. With tracking technology, Wida could track in real time if local volunteers in 47 cities have picked up or received excess food from their local chain, making the food distribution accountable and able to be turned into useful data for future reference.

In addition, Wida connected her movement to support food producers and retail companies' zero-waste food programs, tapping the CSR program as a resource to the movement. In the past 5 years, Wida partnered with Danone, Nestle, Superindo, ABC, Tous Le Jous and Lenovo. They are also working with Cisco to create an app to connect local food banks with food donors. The app will make the system much easier for everyone to be accountable, get easier access, and easily connect across Indonesia. Through the movement of 8000 volunteers across Indonesia, YLPI has contributed to distributing 3,300 tons of excess food, with 223,477 beneficiaries across Indonesia. The network of volunteers played a crucial role in making the numbers happen. Wida successfully unleashed the leadership skills of volunteer coordinators in each area through a series of training. The volunteers also have the freedom to be as creative as possible. In Semarang and Yogyakarta, the volunteers successfully convinced their local government to take part in the movement; the Government of Semarang provided a moving truck to the volunteers, and the government of Yogyakarta created local regulations about the food excess. Wida also ensures the commitment of the coordinator with a letter of commitment and integrity and creates an organisational structure for each location consisting of a coordinator of volunteers, a secretary and a treasurer. This structure works to mitigate possible challenges in different locations.

During COVID 19 in 2020, the YLPI was chosen by the Indonesian Government to distribute social aid kits in several cities in Indonesia, including Jakarta. Wida took this opportunity to demonstrate the model that YLPI had implemented. In addition, throughout the social aid kit distribution process, many people asked to be part of volunteers at YLPI and the network of volunteers grew significantly across Indonesia. Even after the COVID-19 pandemic ended, the volunteers stayed and now have become an important asset for the movement. In addition, reflecting on the success of food excess regulations by several countries, such as Korea and France, Wida has also begun a policy advocacy for the government. Wida works with professors in several universities to create academic drafts for the government and has been involved in drafting food excess and waste regulations in Jakarta in 2019. Wida was invited by the Indonesian parliament to give her expert opinion on the Food Resilience Bill. In 2022, the Indonesian president founded The National Food Agency (NFA) of Indonesia. One of the main responsibilities of the NFA is to figure out how to make food resilient and manage food excess in Indonesia. Then, the NFA adopted the YLPI program and co-created several programs together in 2023. The Ministry of Women Empowerment and Children also adopted Wings of Mother as one of the programs under the Child Growth and Development Deputy. In addition, National Research Institution Indonesia (BRIN) also asked YLPI as its research partner on the issue. Wida started to see the pattern of network inside the government system that supported her idea and became a strategic partner in advocating food excess and food waste policy in the future.

Wida was born as the fifth child of seven siblings. She was raised by a single mother who worked hard to raise their children. In middle school, Wida started her changemaking journey by initiating her school to have a school canteen. Wida mobilized her mother and her friend’s mother to cook healthy food and sell it at the canteen, which helped the students get a good meal instead of snacks outside the school.

Since childhood, her late mother always wanted her children to have a good education and advised them to dedicate themselves to others. Since then, Wida committed to continue studying at a top university in Indonesia. She was accepted at the University of Indonesia and spent her university years working part-time as editor of a magazine and became a scholarship hunter to support her financially during university life. These experiences made Wida a problem-solver and trained her to be as creative as possible to get a better education for herself and her family.

After completing university, Wida worked for several years in corporate marketing before founding a PR Agency with her partner. Throughout her career, Wida had been thinking about solving some of Indonesia's most pressing issues. Starting from a small experiment of distributing free breakfast to low-income families, Wida and her husband realized the size of the food issue and decided to dedicate their lives to creating innovation in solving the issue of food excess, which the government was still neglecting at the time. The small experiment slowly became a bigger social movement through her network across Indonesia and she decided to resign from corporate work and founded the Yayasan Lumbung Pangan Indonesia, now widely known as a movement to fight hunger in Indonesia and the first to mainstream the concept of the food bank in Indonesia.